Let’s be honest, no strategy (however valid) stays perfect forever. Success doesn’t come from copy/pasting strategies from one year to the next. Strategies have to evolve to meet the changing needs and expectations of both the market and an audience base. If your content marketing strategy looks eerily similar to last year’s (or even scarier, the previous year’s), it’s time to re-evaluate. Below we’ve laid out eight eleven ways to improve your content marketing strategy.
We’re juicing up this post with a few extra insights to help you ensure your 2022 content marketing strategy is set up for success.
11 Tips to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
1) Frame Your Strategy With Impactful Goals
Any strategy that doesn’t move your business in the right direction is a waste of time and capital. There, we said it. Your strategy shouldn’t be: Write Content = Hopefully, Make Money.
First, set an expectation for your content marketing strategy. Assign an anticipated ROI to your investment. This expectation could be tied to an increase in soft metrics like audience growth, web traffic, engagements. It could also focus on the hard metrics, for example sales, leads, site conversions, and others..
Determine the results you want to see from your content marketing efforts. Then, audit your strategy to ensure that the roadmap you’ve created aligns with the destination you’re expecting.
2) Include a Measurement Strategy
Additionally, your strategy should include a section that identifies how you’re going to measure impact, ROI, and success along the way. Most businesses can use a combination of Analytics and their CRM/sales tools to measure their content marketing success. More complex companies may need to invest in additional tools to measure the full impact of their content marketing efforts.
3) Define Your Audience
With goals in place, it’s time to ensure your content marketing strategy is aimed at the “right” audience (or audiences). You should first make sure you understand who you’re trying to reach before you start worrying about content marketing topics and formats.
Your audience is more than just gender and age. A proper audience definition should include:
- Critical problems your business helps solve
- Trigger language that resonates with your audience
- An understanding of their preferred form of content
- What keeps them from becoming a customer?
You can churn out content marketing pieces that resonate with your audience quicker when you know more about your audience.
4) Articulate Your Budget
Don’t think of your content marketing budget as a single bucket of money. You may end up finding yourself out of funds by mid-August. Instead, use your budget to help influence your content marketing publishing schedule.
Understand the costs behind individual pieces of content and work backward to determine how many posts you can afford to publish and promote within a given month. Remember, consistency is the name of the game when it comes to content marketing.
5) Include Tactics to Build Your Audience
Your content marketing strategy needs to include the tactics you’re going to use to build your audience throughout the year.
Even if you plan to let your audience grow organically, you should still put some thought into how to support your organic growth efforts. Simply updating small things, like newsletter subscribe CTA’s, or social follow buttons can make a big difference.
6) Map Out Your Content Creation Workflow
Another way to improve your content marketing strategy is to analyze your content creation workflow. Look for opportunities to improve, enhance, or simplify your workflow. Finding efficient ways to create content means your team will be able to create more content each month using the same budget.
Two specific areas to analyze when mapping your content creation workflow:
- Process Streamlining: Removing or scaling back steps steps to streamline your content creation process
- Fractional Content: Adding steps to your process to create fractional, smaller pieces of content based off of your larger pieces of content
7) Craft a Plan To Create Content for Every Stage of the Customer’s Journey
The three main stages of the customer journey are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
A well-rounded content marketing strategy includes tactics and plans to produce content aimed at each stage in the funnel. Audit your content marketing strategy to ensure you’re not focusing too much on one stage of the funnel while ignoring the other stages.
8) Incorporate Content Amplification Tactics
Whether you’re relying on organic search, paid media, or advocacy marketing, your content marketing strategy needs to include tactics for amplifying your content. After all, what’s the point in producing content if no one engages with it?
** SHAMELESS PROMOTION ** if you’re tired of giving ol’ Zuckerberg your hard-earned money, consider starting a fan advocacy program to amplify your content. With fan advocacy, your biggest fans become your loudest voice, sharing your content to their personal social news feed. You can learn more about how SocialToaster supports a brand’s advocacy marketing efforts right here.
Whatever your amplification tactics, be sure you account for them in both your budget and your goals.
9) Mix Up Your Media
If you still haven’t dipped your toe into video or audio content, commit to embracing these mediums in 2022 – especially if your aiming to engage with a younger demographic.
A recent survey found that, 89% of Gen Zers use YouTube and 68% use Snapchat weekly.
If you’re new at creating video or audio content, don’t feel that you need to invest thousands of dollars into a masterpiece. Start with smaller 10 – 15 second clips, then work your way up to longer pieces once you have a solid understanding of what your audience responds to.
10) Ditch The Noise and Solve Issues
Take it from fellow marketer, there is WAAAAAYYYY too much content noise out there. If you want your content to strike a chord with your audience and help push your business forward, you need to create content of value.
By far, the most common ways for a brand to create content of value is to:
- Create content that entertains.
- Produce content that educates.
- Write content that inspires.
- Publish content that solves an issue.
11) Stay Authentic to Your Brand
Avoid jumping on any content-creation bandwagon, just because a competitor is making content around a certain topic, doesn’t mean you should. Your audience engages with your content because they want to interact with your brand. The more that your content reflects your brand voice, mission, and vision, the stronger the connect you’ll force with your audience.
The simplest way to follow this tip is to stay consistent. If you’re jumping around to different styles of content, messaging, creative, etc. you’re going to appear scatterbrained (or even worst, fake). Don’t underestimate your audience. They can spot the difference between when you’re creating content just for the hype, and when you’re creating content to provide value – and they’ll punish/reward your brand accordingly.
Start Your Content Marketing On The Right Foot
The new year is officially upon us! Now is the time to ensure you’ve got the right content marketing strategy in place. Use the above tips to take your content marketing efforts to the next level and be sure not to skimp on your amplification strategy. Whether it’s email, paid media, or fan advocacy, even the best content marketing strategy relies on the underlying crazy thought that people need to SEE your content in order to be affected BY your content.
Not sure how you’re going to amplify your content? Let us help. Schedule a call with one of our content amplification specialists today to learn how SocialToaster can help you leverage the sharing power of your biggest fans to share your content.
